The Dao of Magic: Book III

by Andries Louws

  Being a small rabbit, she needs less qi to form a cultivation base, though not a proportional amount less, since it varies between a third and a half less than a standard size humanoid.

  The expanding qi cloud she is inside contains enough qi for ten people to advance to the solid core stage.

  Lola’s body oversaturates with qi, flooding every single cell, pore, and fibre of her being with fire and ice in conflict. Her conscious mind is confused again.Her body felt really nice a moment before, but now things are starting to hurt again.

  She never felt things like this when near the big giver of food. He played with her until she got tired, sure, but he’d immediately make her feel better by scratching between her ears. The few times she went on adventures of her own, bad stuff kept happening.

  She feels him somewhere down below, so she does what he taught her. She kicks against the air. When it doesn’t work, she does it again but with more power. The fourth time she puts all her power inside her legs, keeping nothing back, and kicks again. The golden glow breaks into shards as Lola’s horn - now red and blue intertwined - pierces Tree’s barrier.

  The still expanding cloud of qi follows her downward. It flows through the path of least resistance, the place where Lola punched through. It speeds up further as Lola’s heartcore calls to the power to fill it again.

  Teach, who just now woke from his creative daze, has enough time to look upwards and see Lola shooting towards him. She smacks against the sword, which smacks against his chest which then causes him to fall backwards. His own heartcore is unwilling to let Lola splatter herself against an unmoving body cultivator, so it decided to cushion her fall.

  Teach has just enough time to look at the rabbit on his chest with an angry expression before the duo is inundated by a pillar of blue and orange power.

  ⁂

  “It looks… cute!” Re-Haan is trying very hard not to giggle. Ah, there she goes. She’s rolling on the floor again, clutching her stomach.

  “You still have a lot to learn about social conventions, Like tact.” I look at her with a death stare, which she ignores.

  “It’s… a lot more powerful now, though.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Ket,” I growl.

  “It feels heavier.”

  “Bord, I swear to god.” I glare at the rabbit sitting on my shoulder once again. She looks so proud and happy. For fuck’s sake… I drop my shoulders, which only causes the shitty rabbit to shift and lean against my neck.

  I look at the sword in my hand. It’s beautifully made, clean lines make a sharp edge and the blackness is interwoven with an intricate silver tree. I wrapped the handle in leather. I should have wrapped it in bunny leather.

  I give a despondent look at my new sword. Its pommel is now a cute bunny’s paw, while above and below the silver tree are two very cute pictures of a bunny’s face. One is glowing orange, the other glowing blue.

  I sigh in defeat. The weapon really underwent a baptism when Lola and me got bathed in that stream of power. The weapon feels half alive now. I managed to absorb a part of that power, further building my foundation, but that was just a drop in the bucket I need to fill.

  The majority of the power went into Lola and the sword. Lola managed to level up quite a bit, but the sword underwent some sort of fundamental change. I made it according to a technical drawing, a collection of materials through which energies would flow.

  Now, the two mana stones are partially interwoven through the metal instead of just being encased. The image of Tree is more intricate and actually seems to move in the wind. The pictures of Lola… are way too fucking cute.

  I see Selis keep herself back from touching the weapon. Or maybe Lola? The red and blue locks on her forehead do look kind of cool.

  No, Drew, you are still mad at the shitty rabbit. Remember that.

  I hold the blade out to the blue haired girl. “Do you want it? It will fit that brutish fighting style you chose way back. It’s a bit too girly for me…”

  Selis nearly nods, but shakes her head with a pained expression. “No thanks, I’m not ready for a weapon yet. I don’t want to develop a dependency like that.”

  Shoot. I could make a new one, but that thing took nearly my entire storage of precious metals. Database and Tree filtered many tonnes of seawater and dirt, sure, but titanium, platinum and other rare elements are still not easily acquired without dedicated mining operations. Casually filtering water and ground has its limits, after all.

  “And Rhea, don’t sleep on the job. Or maybe do go and sleep, you’re a dragon after all. Anyway, you’re no longer the second most powerful cultivator here.” I point at the little shit on my shoulder. Lola somehow managed to make the ice and fire mountain explode while stepping into the foundation realm.

  I have to compliment Tree for isolating the dual outburst so well. The volcano is still slightly smoking and the ice mountain looks kind of cracked, but the only damage to the forest are some isolated pieces of lava and ice that have fallen here and there.

  I still feel pissed, though. So, let’s vent. I wave away the people about to touch my blade. “I’m going to vent. See ya.”

  I step through the floating remnant of the dimensional gate I used last time. I don’t need to let my necklace float outside in the real world anymore. I can grab onto the crack I stepped through previously. Spatial instabilities like that fade away with time, but small ones fade slower than big rips, weirdly enough.

  I kick off the ground, ignoring the burned husk of a town I’m in, and speed upwards. I spin around in a circle and spot a large patch of forest being trampled. I viciously rip the air behind me, causing me to shoot forwards with an air-breaking scream. The big bastards are marching southwards again, going back to where they came from.

  They won’t be returning though. I half expected Lola to be scared of moving so suddenly, but she is just sitting there on my shoulder. I should have expected that. She rode a volcanic ice explosion just now.

  I scream my lungs out while smashing down my sword in the middle of the group. The eight-meter-tall, naked cat I just cleaved in half looks at me accusingly, before its front part falls over, well cooked and steaming, while its hind part crashes into ice crystals.

  I grab Lola from my shoulder and throw her at an enormous spider. “You do the creepies. COME AT ME! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU….”

  chapter seventeen

  Sparring

  Man, cutting loose and venting every single frustration through the medium of raw physical violence is extremely gratifying. The fact that I’m furthering my own cultivation at a neat clip, while discovering how Lola and my new sword interact is a nice side-benefit.

  “Ice,” I bark to the small rabbit. The red fire in her eyes is immediately replaced by a cold blue, while my sword gets bathed in red flames. Good thing I made my clothes fireproof, or I’d be fighting in the nude right now.

  The qi swirling in my brain allows me to consciously observe the slimy worm that’s shooting towards me. My heartcore and its accompanying instincts are already turning my core, setting my centre of weight at an angle to the incoming weight. I pull my sword forwards, leaving a scorching trail in the air.

  The purple and blue worm flies into the glowing edge, causing two massive halves of cauterized worm to shoot past me. I only needed to keep the sword steady and reinforce the ground below my feet. There are few trees left standing around me, but the sheer face of rock behind me is less easily flattened. I start moving preemptively.

  The two worm halves smash against the cliff behind me, spraying water and air mana-infused goop in a wide semicircle. Lola freezes the large splash about to cover her and kicks the chunk of ice towards a dark green, slug-bear hybrid.

  I let my sword’s momentum swing it in a circle, divesting a furry centipede of a few of its many limbs. Lola squeaks, so I prepare for the shift. The qi flow in my sword reverses as all the fire energies are sucked into that horrible, terrible fucking stain on my otherwise majestic sword. A floo
d of biting ice - absolute stillness in a vicious blue - surges from the other abhorrently shameful and mortifying emblem on my sword.

  The red bunny cartoon fades, while the blue bunny cartoon starts glowing blue. The silver tree connecting both now contains more blue than red as qi circulates through its internal circuits.

  I take all the anger, shame, and fury I feel at this fucking piece of metal, and what Lola has done to it, and use it to power my next swing. A cone-shaped patch of forest fifty meters long and ninety degrees wide turns into a winter wonderland. Lola smashes from the sky like a flaming comet, her large red horn impacting the still tableau of blue and shattering every single being, plant, and clod of dirt in a large incinerating shockwave.

  I only feel my anger grow. She keeps using that horn even though she knows I despise it. She took on a dual fire and ice cultivation, knowing full well that it’s a smack in the face of rational science. Intermingling fire and frozen water is not special or powerful. It’s just matter at discrete thermal states, god damn it! And the worst part, SHE RUINED MY SWORD RAHRAHGAGHGAAAAA!

  I pull at the two embedded sources of power in the sword, intermingling the red and blue in a twisting, raging stream of power. Lola plops to the ground, the jet of fire she was using to propel herself suddenly vanishing as I take control of the two types of qi intent. I start using the large slab of alloy as a counterweight, using it to keep balance while I begin spinning. I build up momentum in a few hasty circles like an Olympian hammer thrower on - literally - all the steroids. I let my heartcore do all the heavy lifting on this one, my braincore shudders at the impractical nature of this skill, but I’m pissed, so I don’t care.

  Lola looks my way with large eyes. She immediately lies flat to the ground, covering her ears with her front paws. I double check my position - away from the cliff and surrounded by massive beasts running at me - and let all the energy in my sword flow through the very tip.

  The centrifugal force aids me as the stream of power explodes from the blade, forming a cutting sheet of power just a few molecules thick but a full three hundred and sixty degrees wide. The blue and red powers are still at odds with each other, so the dual coloured circle of light shooting away from me disintegrates into a ring-shaped explosion as it travels a hundred or so meters away from me.

  I drop the sword to the ground, letting the shameful iconography be covered by a spray of dirt. All the large animals in a circle around me fall to the ground, cut in half by the blade of pure energy. I wait for the dust to settle and see that everything beyond a hundred meters is an absolute wasteland.

  Lola hops on my shoulder, her blue and red forelock now slightly dimmed and faded. Aww, she is still so cute! I’m about to pet the little thing when I remember I’m putting on a show. I fall on my knees, bash the ground with my fist a bit, and squeeze out a few tears for good measure, pretending to be absolutely drained and near powerless in the process.

  “NOOO ANGETAAAAA! Why were you so angry all the time? Why did you have to cause me such grief and delay all my plans for this planet for hundreds of years?Why, Angeta, whyyyyy?” I bash the ground a few more times and do some dramatic sobbing. Lola nibbles at my ear, almost as if she wants to ask me what the hell is wrong.

  “Why do the good ones always die so young? Sleep well, my beautiful princess.” I check and still feel the extremely subtle influence steering me into a direction of pure anger and destructiveness. No time to be sad. Let’s not make it any more suspicious than it already is.

  “I’ll take these corpses with me, so I can beat them up some more for killing poor, poor Angeta! I will make sure their vile spirits won’t rest in peace!” Because I’ll make sure to make most of them rest in pieces, in my stomach! I suppress both drool and laughter from coming out of my mouth, as I keep a snarl on my face, collecting all the tasty looking animals one by one.

  I suck one more six-legged white and green cow, the size of an apartment block, into my ring and decide that that’s enough. There are still a few large spider, slug, and worm type corpses left in reasonably good shape, but no thank you. Meat is meat is meat, I know, but I’m not going to honour any spider with the privilege of being cooked by me.

  With one last angry and dramatic shout, I step into Tree.

  ⁂

  “Stop looking at him. Are the clothes done yet?” Re-Haan puts a hand on the shoulder of a transfixed beastkin, turning the furry woman to face her.

  “Ah, miss Re-Haan. The clothes were done hours ago. You can pick… them… Oh the dragons above, that smell…” The woman’s head turns as she starts looking away from Re-Haan and starts staring at the spectacle again.

  That insufferable man Drew is always doing something to draw attention to himself. This time he is standing in the ruins of his freshly demolished castle, surrounded by a wide array of fresh ingredients. He’s moving around like a maniac while manhandling a wok the size of a person, moving it over a brightly burning bunny.

  “Stop complaining, and no you can’t go take a lava bath. This is the least you can do for defacing my sword. And the last time you went to one of the thermic mountains it blew up. You are banned from going near either one until you stabilize that mess of a cultivation base.” Teach shouts at the grumpy rabbit as she continues to emit a steady heat.

  “I can pick up the clothes where?” Re-Haan pulls the woman away from her entertainment once again.

  “Ah, so sorry, miss Re-Haan! You can pick them up from the main building on the moon. They are still being drained of their loose qi up there. The structural qi in them seems to be holding up, so we finished up the requested batches before we got the final testing results ready.” Having said her piece, the beastwoman turns to observe Teach again, just in time to see him dice a large haunch of meat with superhuman speed.

  Rhea is about to leave when she feels a tug on her sleeve. Turning, she sees the beastwoman again, the redness on her face even visible through her fur. “Sorry ma’am, b-but might I ask for a point advance? I just realized I haven’t eaten in two weeks and would very much like to purchase some of that.”

  Rubbing her temples, Re-Haan mentally gives the woman half of the points awarded for the mission. The woman smiles like she was just handed some life-saving treasure and storms off to go stand in line, her stomach growling all the way.

  Re-Haan snorts but stops herself. Teach does indeed know how to cook, and he has been cooking up a storm since he got back. He disappeared for hours after the entire sword incident happened, and just when things calmed down a bit, and Re-Haan was getting the castle reconstruction going, he showed up with a limp bunny in tow and built an impromptu kitchen from the half-cleared ruins.

  Now he is cooking what Rhea recognizes as those enforcer mana mutants, using Lola as a cooking fire.

  “You can’t even control the flame. You nearly burned the veggies! No, you ate enough already. No, you can’t go play with Selis. Your ice control is even worse than your fire control; she wouldn’t survive the rough-housing of a foundation level numbskull like you.”

  Teach pauses his cooking frenzy long enough to address a few bystanders. “Go fetch some more vegetables. Time for Valerius to earn his keep. Lola, continue freezing those fruits slow and steady without freeze-drying them instantly. I can’t make sorbet with cryo-desiccated produce.”

  Re-Haan rubs her own stomach. She really shouldn’t be pissed at him. Her ring is full of food he shoved at her. She wipes the last trace of sauce from her lips and starts walking away while stroking her thumb across her ring.

  The glorious, glittering ring that he gave her. Rhea would never tell him, but she researched the significance that comes with ring giving. She had found out that rings are generally given to people that belong to a family or organization. The black rings with Tree’s silhouette embedded in silver that all the students need before they are allowed outside are obviously the allegiance types.

  Hers isn’t. He’d given it to her as if it were nothing, like it had the same significa
nce of passing a dish during dinner. She’d known him long enough by then to immediately pick up on some clues. He was obviously not looking at her, but her qi senses told her that Teach was focussing a rather sizable chunk of his mental prowess on observing her reaction.

  Then he had seen that she had noticed his focus of observation. He coughed once, basking in the obvious awkwardness of the situation, before walking off after grinning at her.

  Rhea starts floating upwards as she commands the winds to lift her to the moon. She holds her hand in front of her face, inspecting the elegant lines that make up the piece of jewellery. Three bands of black and silver metal twist and dance in a complex pattern around her finger. An exquisite crystal tree sparkles on the ring’s face - one band flattened into a black and silver oval.

  She had thought it strange that he’d given her a ring different from the others. The equivalent features - a large storage space with frozen time - costs a million points when she checked Database.

  Feeling eyes on her back, she turns and looks down. Teach stares at her as he stands there, surrounded by rubble. Rhea turns away, suppressing her reddening cheeks, the moment she sees his features turn into that grin. She has a lot to learn about social interactions and emotions indeed.

  Feeling his attention shift back to the cooking show he is running, she glances at him again. The massive sword on his back looks pretty imposing as he sprinkles a deft pinch of this or that herb on a piece of meat. Teach has wrapped the thing to his back with a stretch of black cloth. It’s just a shame that two bunnies - one bright blue and one dim red - shine through the otherwise opaque cloth.

  Suppressing her mirth, Re-Haan schools her face into a stern expression. She has arrived on the moon and has some managing to do. She sends a mass message through Database, asking for updates on the projects still ongoing as she lands.

  She looks around at the buildings. All kinds of architecture and styles make for a rather abstract and absurd sight. Everything is made from the same white stone as the moon itself, from brick to fence to walkway. The largest among the clusterfuck of buildings is the one Re-Haan is striding towards, a hodgepodge of added rooms, hallways and clashing facades.